This from the guys over at Geek Tyrant, an awesome take on the forthcoming sequel to HP and the DH. This thing oozes doom and gloom while being covered in artistic badassery. It does a great job of capturing the darkness and sadness that runs throughout the final book in the series that the part one of the movie was never able to capture.

According to screenterriers.com The final bit of re-shoots for the forthcoming final chapter in the Harry Potter saga has concluded and with that comes a bit of interesting casting news.

Up first is Ben Clarke who has apparently been cast as a young Severus Snape for the purpose of flash backs and back story. Not a bad choice I guess. Looks a lot like Snape, same hair and facial features. We’ll see how well he plays the nerdy younger version of Snape who once crooned for Potter’s mother in his childhood but ultimately lost out to her to the much more dashing James Potter.

Ben Clarke as Young Severus Snape…

now the spoilery stuff

Bertie Gilbert has been cast as Scorpius Malfoy(the son of Draco Malfoy), who appears in the final chapter of the book which takes place many years after the final battle. In this chapter of the book, quite a few of the main characters of the story have ventured back to Kings Crossing to send their children off to Hogwarts and do a little catching up around platform 9 and 8/4ths. It will be interesting to see if this ending stays the same or is adjusted to allow for future sequels not based on books (which has long been the rumor about town). Either way it gives us something to look forward to after the lackluster Deathly Hallows pt 1.

This is not what I signed up for. That’s the thought that kept going through my head as I sat watching Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I was expecting action, adventure, intrigue, and mystery. What I got was an overwrought drama ripe with poor pacing, questionable narrative choices, and what amounts to a movie based on what I feel to be weakest book of the series.

It’s an issue that has really been present since the beginning of this series but usually it’s the other way around. I would read the book finding it at times breathtaking, heartbreaking, and at the least interesting but often it just didn’t transfer to the screen. I found most of the problems with the earlier movies to be the fact that they tried to cut a book that could have been made into three or four movies into a single film. Integral parts would be left out or important character developing scenes that played to the overall story were left on the cutting room floor to make room for action sequences and such. I can’t blame them, there’s a lot of material there to pull from but ultimately a few poor decisions on the director’s behalf have left many of the previous entries a bit flat. I will say this though, up until this point the movies had become incrementally better as they got the Potter formula mixed, but they really seemed to drop the ball regarding this latest entry.

It’s not like I didn’t see this coming, I knew from the first day I picked up The Deathly Hallows that they would struggle to turn this movie into something interesting. I really felt for the first time that this movie would actually be helped by sizing down bits and pieces from this book and had they stuck with the formula they had been working with they surely would have had a decent finale to wrap it up with. That is until they got greedy. Someone decided if they split up the book into too parts they could maximize profits. Big mistake. The boring parts of the book have now become central to the plot. Almost the entire second act of the movie, which in a shorter version would have been a fifteen minute montage, leads us on a tedious journey into the wilds of Potter Land, where apparently all you do is argue, share exposition until you reveal a clue, and argue some more.

Ultimately this movie is exactly what the book was, an overwritten money grab. An opportunity to stretch the already thin narrative to the breaking point in order to maximize profit points. The only thing we have to look forward to now is how Hollywood rewrites the ending to the movie so they can go out on their own and start making their own Potter movies, cartoons, and TV shows. Here’s what I suggest, Harry finds out that Hermione is his sister, Ron is a ginger robot servant, and Valdemort is your father Harry! I smell prequels! Somebody get Lucas on the phone and see if he’s interested in directing this for us.